Saxby is the founder and principal of Chief Outsiders , a Houston-based cooperative executive search firm that specializes in placing chief marketing officers with mostly midsized businesses. These placements aren't traditional full-time roles, but they come with enough normal compensation packages to attract their attention, often on a part-time basis.

"It gives a best-of-breed CMO the chance to really move the needle at a company, do what they love," he said. "And do it all without the brutal back-office politics."

Saxby seems to be onto something with his idea to treat executives like professional athletes -- that is, pay them a boatload but for clearly specified terms and roles. He says he has doubled sales with his on-demand executive model every year for the past three. And his firm has grown from Saxby working out of his study to a business with a staff of 24.

Saxby's trick? Offer big-time marketing muscle from his bullpen of talent to mostly smaller firms that usually cannot afford first-rate marketing help, either because of limited budgets, feeble business propositions or stodgy brands.

"Take how we deal with a family-owned company, " he explained. The people who run these firms, he said, are usually smart. They know their company and their markets well. But new ideas can be a challenge. By bringing in a marketing outsider for a defined engagement, a firm can handle a specific product rollout. And nobody in management's inner circle is threatened, so all can relax and focus on getting the job done.

"It's understood that whoever we place will never replace a relative of the CEO who might manage marketing," Saxby said. "My people are leaving no matter what happens. There is simply none of the corner office intrigue that slows progress."

Rent-an-execSaxby's ability to be Virtual-Johnny-CMO-on-the-spot is dead easy to do technologically. It turns out that, just like any other information-based job -- whether it's in engineering, law or medicine -- it is a techno non-event for the supposedly irreplaceable, hands-on executive to be injected effortlessly into complex business problems from afar.

"It really depends on how geographically centric a business is," Saxby told me.

Sometimes his people need to be close at hand -- say, if product prototyping is important. But often, what a company needs is product expertise or fresh market vertical insight, which can often be handled better away from company headquarters.